Introduction and Landscape

Why was the report written?

In order to provide deeper insights into retail banks' ICT investment priorities and strategic objectives.

What is the current market landscape and what is changing?

Kable's survey finds that a significant proportion of retail banks have already invested in enterprise applications and these solutions are expected to receive higher investments in the next two years.

What are the key drivers behind recent market changes?

Demand for applications such as financials, CLM, and CRM applications is on the rise, which is making retail banks focus heavily on enterprise applications. Moreover, in an effort to modernise and automate their banking operations retail banks are investing in enterprise applications.

What makes this report unique and essential to read?

Kable Global ICT Intelligence has invested significant resources in order to interview CIOs and IT managers about their IT investment priorities. Very few IT analyst houses will have interviewed 130+ ICT decision makers in retail banking industry in H2 2012.

Learn about the drivers that are influencing retail banks' investments in each technology category.

Establish how retail banks' IT budgets are currently allocated across various segments within a technology category.

Gain insight into how retail banks' plan to change their ICT budget allocations across various segments within a technology category.

Key Market Issues

Investment in security products and services is imperative for retail banks as any vulnerability in their existing systems can cause huge financial losses for their customers and damage their reputation. It is clear from the survey that X% of retail banks already invested in security technologies.

The ongoing modernisation of retail banks, along with increasingly complex ICT implementations, is making ICT infrastructure within the sector harder to manage. Consequently, to minimise the complexity of their ICT infrastructure, retail banks are making significant investments in IT systems management.

It is interesting to note that at least 62% of retail banks are planning to invest in all of the green technologies through to the end of 2014, signifying the importance they are placing on reducing their carbon footprint and the impact of ICT on the environment.

Cloud computing is currently receiving lower investments from the retail banking sector, where it has an adoption rate of only 79%. Many banks are still reluctant to entrust their sensitive customer and financial data to public cloud services run by third parties.

Retail banks have been investing in enterprise content management to capture unstructured content and integrate it with their core business applications. Retail banks are also investing in content management solutions to manage data more effectively and meet regulatory compliance and business needs.

Key Highlights

In the next two years, solutions such as CLM and financial solutions are expected to garner greater interest, as 62% and 60% of retail banks are planning to invest in these applications respectively.

Kable's survey finds that the demand for real-time business intelligence and social sentiment analysis is expected to increase within retail banks, with 59% and 53% of organisations respectively planning to invest here in the next two years.

The demand for tablet computing is expected to increase in the near future, with 62% of retail banks planning to make purchases here through to the end of 2014. The uptake of tablet computing is anticipated to be particularly high in large retail banks in the next two years.

Kable's survey shows that investment in web/video conferencing solutions and unified communications is a high priority for retail banks, with current penetration rates of 69% for each of these categories.

According to Kable's survey, spending on end-point security is expected to be the highest priority in the next two years, with 67% of respondents planning investments in this segment.

Table of Contents

1. Enterprise ICT investment trends

1.1. Introduction

1.2. Survey demographics

1.3. ICT budget changes

1.4. Strategic objectives

1.5. Core technology investment priorities

2. Detailed ICT investment priorities

2.1. Introduction

2.2. Enterprise applications

2.3. Business intelligence

2.4. Security

2.5. Content management

2.6. Mobility

2.7. IT systems management

2.8. Communications and collaboration

2.9. Green IT and virtualization

2.10. Cloud computing solutions

3. Summary

3.1. Retail banks are primarily investing in technologies which streamline business operations and support revenue growth